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Easy Pistachio Gluten Free Cookies.

I was doing a taste test of some new flavored cookies a while back and found some pistachio creme filled something or other, and thought to myself "That idea is totally nuts."

I didn't have high hopes for enjoying it... but it totally brought me around. I've been missing out on a whole potential of pistachio flavored sweets.

My third thought was that I might be able to tweak a recipe to make a Pistachio Macaroon.

I was right. The hardest part is getting ground pistachios and pistachio extract.

So I shelled pistachios while chatting with a friend, and found a cake and candy store nearby that had the highly distilled essence of pistachio.

If you are willing to cheat I suppose you could look for pistachio flour on amazon, and LorAnn oils pistachio flavor (a drop or two will do ya, I mix the drop with a little less than an 8th of a teaspoon of vanilla extract).

you'll need:

a tightly packed down cup of pistachio flour or ground pistachios.

1/3 cup of sugar

a couple drops of pistachio flavor or 1/4 teaspoon of pistachio extract

1/8 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 egg white (from a large white egg)

and a love of pistachios, and also an oven, you'll need one of those too.

Step 1: Lets Crack This Nut.

I think it's important to find yourself some unsalted pistachios. But maybe you like salty cookies, I don't know you that well, and I won't judge you for it.

You could buy some pistachio meal/flour if you look for it online somewhere, but be prepared to shell out some dough for it.

So I bought some whole unsalted pistachios at my local store and shelled them while chatting with a friend, it's kind of like having a fidget spinner that pays you 8$ in saved money at the end of it. Plus I can use the shells in crafts.

It'd probably go faster if I had a real blender or food processor, but I don't so it didn't. Just grind and sift, put the bigger bits back with the next batch of nuts to grind. It's alright to have a little bit of course ground left at the end, it lends a little texture to the end result.

and getting ahead of myself I put some non-stick baking parchment on the huge baking tray I have no idea why we have.

Onward to the next step!

Step 2: Mixing Things Up a Bit.

My one pound (that Lbs, not the currency) bag of pistachio yielded (after a long fight) two cups of unshelled nuts which turned into about 2.5 cups of ground pistachios. Although that number might have been thrown off by incidental consumption of a few nuts during the shelling process. Such are the sacrifices we make.

If tightly packed into the cup you can count it as two cups, which is convenient because the recipe works great with a cup of ground pistachio.

I split the ground pistachio in half and packed it down in the cup. Using less than that made a very liquid batter that was hard to work with the first time I did this, the packed cup (half the ground nuts) made it a much more manageable dough.

Here I mixed the dry ingredients together first.

1 tight packed cup of ground pistachio

1/3 cup of sugar

and theeeen...

Step 3: Personal Taste

The pistachio flavor I have is about 10x more potent than an extract, so it's easy to overdo it if you are not careful. With other versions of this cookie using an extract I usually would use about 1/4 teaspoon plus a few drops more. In this case I use about a drop or two.

Vanilla extract lends a little something to this as well, and so I just use roughly 1/8 teaspoon of vanilla extract into which I put two drops of the pistachio flavor. I mixed that into the dry ingredients.

Meanwhile I preheated the oven to 350F.

Almost there...

Step 4: No Yolks for This One.

One egg white. If you save the yolks from three batches of these cookies you can have eggs benedict in the morning. Yah!

when mixed with a spoon, it gathers all the dry ingredients in this attractive mess.

Step 5: You Knead This.

Look, I know alright, it aint pretty. Just go with it for now. Knead this up a bit to make sure the extracts and everything are evenly distributed. And also because my hands got all kinds of sticky with this I wanted to share the joy with you.

I rolled it out into a snake. Yes, a snake. Quiet you.

It makes it easier to divide in half and then half and then... Look you want 16 of the things, all relatively the same size, and eyeballing it doesn't cut it... a knife does that.

Step 6: We Made Cookies!

smoosh them out on the baking parchment relatively flat, they won't spread too much but give them a little room. You back them at 350 for 10 minutes.

Not twelve, unless you want cookies that are brown, with a hint of toast flavor and a texture like a ginger snap.

Not 8 unless you like your cookies under done.

Now your oven may vary, so you have to watch these things like a hawk. I'm not kidding about the hard as a ginger snap thing. The trick is that they don't look done when they are done. They will feel soft if you poke them, stick to the non-stick parchment, and crumble if you try flipping one before it's cooled. But that temptation to leave them a bit longer is a trap. While you can leave a dent in them right out of the oven, the bottoms are crispy and golden, and as they cool they will have a crispy outside and a chewy inside.

You'll want to put them in a container after they cool so they don't dry out. I don't have a picture of that step, because the cookies magically disappeared. *burp* no idea where they went, so I couldn't get that final picture. Hope you try these out and enjoy them.